they are watching you 59
over their keyboards in an open work space, aside
from a few conference rooms named after some
of the company’s heroes—among them, Galileo,
Gandhi, and Al Gore. I sat in one of them over-
looking the upscale employee cafeteria, where
lunch would later be followed by a happy hour
of Napa wines and California microbrews.
Marshall and Schingler joined me. The former
is a lanky Brit with wire-frame glasses; the latter,
a broad-shouldered and easygoing Californian.
Both are 39 and seemed fully recovered from
their dinner the previous evening to celebrate the
fifth anniversary of when they started working
full time at Planet. At NASA they had been cap-
tivated by the idea of taking pictures from space,
especially of Earth—and for reasons that were
humanitarian rather than science based.
They experimented
by launching ordinary
smartphones into or-
bit, confirming that a
relatively inexpensive
camera could function
in outer space. “ We
thought, What could
we do with those im-
ages?” Schingler said.
“How can we use these
things for the benefit
of humanity? List the
world’s problems: poverty, housing, malnutri-
tion, deforestation. All of these problems are
more easily addressed if you have more up-to-
date information about our planet. Like you wake
up in a few years and you find there’s a hole in the
Amazon forest. What if we could have supplied
information about this more rapidly to the Bra-
zilian government?”
In storybook fashion, Marshall and Schingler
developed their first model in a garage in Silicon
Valley. The idea was to design a relatively low-cost,
shoe box–size satellite to minimize the military-
scale budgets often required for designing such
technology—and then, as Marshall told me, “to
launch the largest constellation of satellites in
human history.” By deploying many such de-
vices, the company would be able to see daily
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changes on the Earth’s surface in totality.
In 2013 they launched their first satellites and
received their first photographs, which provided
a far more dynamic look at life around the world
than previous global mapping imagery. “The
thing that surprised us most,” said Marshall,
“is that almost every picture that came down
showed how the Earth was changing. Fields were
reshaped. Rivers moved. Trees were taken down.
Buildings went up. Seeing all of this completely
changes our concept of the planet as being stat-
ic. And instead of just having a figure about how
much a country has been deforested, people can
now be motivated by pictures that show the de-
forestation taking place.”
Today Planet has more than 200 satellites in
orbit, with about 150 it calls Doves that can image
every bit of land every
day when conditions
are right. Planet has
ground stations as far
away as Iceland and
Antarctica. Its clients
are just as varied. The
company works with
the Amazon Conser-
vation Association to
track deforestation in
Peru. It has provided
images to Amnesty In-
ternational that document attacks on Rohingya
villages by security forces in Myanmar. At the
Middlebury Institute’s Center for Nonprolifera-
tion Studies, recurring global imaging helps the
think tank watch for the sudden appearance of a
missile test site in Iran or North Korea. And when
USA Today and other publications wanted an aeri-
al image of the Shayrat air base in Syria before and
after it was bombed by the U.S. military last April
in retaliation for a chemical attack on a rebel-
held Syrian town, the news organizations knew
whom to call.
Those are pro bono clients. Its paying custom-
ers include Orbital Insight, a Silicon Valley–based
geo-spatial analytics firm that interprets data
from satellite imagery. With such visuals, Orbit-
al Insight can track the development of road or